Chapter 4 has outlined the original idea and objective of state-dominated mass organizations from the counter-communist period until the semidemocracy period. This chapter will focus on the remobilization of the royalist mass since the toppling of the elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra by the 2006 coup. I will discuss the reinvigoration of the remnant organizations from the Cold War era, the creation of new groups and programme, their targets, the ruling elites’ objectives and the reasons for joining state-sponsored mass organizations.

The policy of the semi-democracy regime to maintain the military-dominated mass organizations, despite the fall of the CPT, proved beneficial to the conservative elites when they faced new political threats. They could switch on the mass control programme immediately. The moves to remobilize, expand and strengthen their popular base began after the coup in 2006. They targeted a wide range of people from villagers to urban professionals, business and religious groups, the old and the young. Royalnationalist ideology remained the central theme for cementing people into a state apparatus, along with many material benefits for members of the mass organizations. The effectiveness of these organizations is doubtful. There are many official reports, news pieces, announcements, video clips, and pictures about activities of the military-dominated mass organizations posted on the websites, Facebook and YouTube accounts of ISOC, the army, ISOC provincial offices and of various mass organizations. Materials collected from these sources have proven to be very useful for this chapter.

OBJECTIVES

Since the coup in 2006, the establishment has faced a series of challenges: the unbeatable popularity of the exiled Thaksin Shinawatra and his parties; the emergence of the Red Shirts movement and polarized colour-coded politics; a proliferation of critical messages towards the monarchy online; the end of the reign of King Bhumibol; the crisis of royal succession; and anti-military movements. The claims that Thailand is a unified country and the monarchy is universally respected have become fiercely contested. Despite military coups in 2006 and 2014 and numerous judicial measures, the Thaksin faction continued to win elections. All these issues caused anxiety about a decline of royal hegemony and the effect on the power and privileges of the conservative ruling elites.

Infiltrating Society opens up new and valuable perspectives on three concerns central to serious understanding of modern Thailand. The first of these concerns is the means by which the military in fact involves itself in the country's politics and governance. The second concern is the specific challenge posed to Thai democracy by the military's employment of those poorly understood means. The last concern is Bangkok's relationship with the Thai provinces—and by extension the country's and society's historically fraught quest for and contest over what, with apologies to modernization theorists of yore, it is appropriate to call national integration.

The closing years of the reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and the opening years of that of his successor King Vajiralongkorn have aroused renewed interest in relations between Thailand's military and its monarchy. Attention has focused above all on the inactivity to which King Bhumibol's infirmity condemned him during the last years of his life and its consequences for the partnership of palace and Army, on the loyalty to the royal institution of the high command of that latter force, on the apparent strength or weakness of various senior officers’ ties to King Vajiralongkorn, and on the new king's decision to assume direct control of certain units of the country's military.

Puangthong Pawakapan denies the importance of none of these foci. But she argues in Infiltrating Society that an effort to understand the bonds between military and monarchy demands that we look well beyond coup plots hatched among senior officers in Bangkok and those same officers’ extravagant poses of loyalty to a notionally timeless and essential Thai monarchy. For the bonds between soldier and sovereign in recent history have in fact owed much to the era of counterinsurgent operations—focused on the perceived security threat of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) and undertaken above all in rural and even remote reaches of the Thai provinces—from the 1960s into the 1980s. At levels both institutional and personal, rural counterinsurgency brought monarchy and military into close and sustained collaboration.

While violence and coercion most marked Thai counterinsurgency, it was not in the main their use that gave rise to this collaboration.

Mass control was one of the most important components of the Thai state's counterinsurgency operations from the early 1960s. Building a loyal citizen base was the aim of state-sponsored mass organizations and popular mobilization. A solid popular base could not only be used against enemies of the state, but could serve as proof of khwam samakkhi, unity, mass support for the state against the alien communists. The sheer number of people and their royal nationalist activities confirmed the legitimacy of the state and the existing social order.

This chapter begins by tracing the operations of state-supported mass organizations during the anti-communist period from the 1960s to early 1980s, when several right-wing movements appeared. Some had good ties with ISOC and were involved in the massacre of students and activists at Thammasat University on 6 October 1976. Their activities and names gradually disappeared from public view after 1976. People tended to assume that the military and its rightist allies had ended the operation of mass organizations, and that the semi-democratic regimes of General Kriangsak Chamanan (October 1977–March 1980) and his successor General Prem Tinsulanonda (March 1980–August 1988) gave no importance to these organizations. Quite the opposite was true.

Despite the appalling reputation of the military-supported rightist militias as a result of the Thammasat massacre, the conservative elites never abandoned the mass control programme as it was still needed to perpetuate their political power. On the one hand, the establishment understood that the state had to retreat from an ultra-rightist position, which would only strengthen its leftist enemy. On the other hand, mass organizations took on new importance after the re-emergence of parliamentary politics from the late 1970s. The military embraced democratization as a new mission, but still saw popular control programmes as an essential element of protecting the country's internal security. This brilliant plan was shaped by the semidemocratic regimes of Kriangsak and Prem, without any awareness on the part of politicians, elected governments, and civil society.

This chapter evaluates the limitations or failures of the military's political offensive during the intense period of counter-communist warfare between the 1960s and the late 1970s.

This book is my first research project on the Thai military. My interest began soon after the coup d’état mounted by the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) on 22 May 2014 but my interest was not in the NCPO junta itself, but in the junta's non-military activities. One incident in particular piqued my curiosity: the forced eviction of thousands of families from the forest reserves. Less than a month after the coup d’état, on 14 June 2014, the junta leader General Prayut Chan-o-cha issued an order about encroachment and destruction of forest resources. Several thousand people were forcibly rooted out of forest reserve land immediately. Their crops were destroyed. Several hundred people faced charges. Then, in August, the junta introduced a master plan to resolve the problems of forest destruction, citing encroachment of forest land by small farmers as one of the major causes. The Internal Security Command Operations (ISOC), together with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, was entrusted with the task of determining and implementing a strategy in coordination with other state agencies. The master plan claimed that the principal objective of this effort was to increase the forest coverage in Thailand from 31.57 per cent of the country's total area to 40 per cent within ten years, which meant around 26 million rai of land (approximately 10.24 million acres or 4.16 million hectares) had to be expropriated (Internal Security Operations Command and Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment 2014, p. 2; Prachatai, 15 June 2014; 17 December 2014).

To begin with, it is intriguing that the management of natural resources would become one of the priorities of the military junta. Perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that the forced eviction took place so soon after the coup and that the junta was able to introduce the master plan within a few months, indicating that the military has been deeply involved in the management of forest reserves long before. The question is when and how did this begin and what was the source of the junta's legitimacy for claiming this role (Puangthong 2015b).

In Chapter 1, I raised the question of how natural resources management became one of the military junta's top priorities. The military forcibly evicted thousands of families from forest reserve areas immediately after the coup d’état of 22 May 2014. The eviction was soon followed by a master plan to reclaim forest land nationwide. This chapter seeks to explain the military's development role and development projects from the counterinsurgency period to the present day, showing how the concept of development for security shifted and expanded, and the implications of these changes.

In Chapter 2, I explained how the term “development for security” or kan phatthana phuea khwam mankhong/yuttha-phatthana was coined to justify the military role in socio-economic and political programmes, and how legal legitimation was secured for this role. This chapter will focus on the political factors and key players in the advancement and expansion of the military's development role into new areas in the post-counterinsurgency period. King Bhumibol and his royal development projects were a leading force against communism. Over two thousand royal development projects and the king's visits to the poor in remote areas undoubtedly won the hearts and mind of people nationwide. The active participation of the monarchy in this area, together with the promotion of the public image of a devoted king, was a core strategy in the Thai state's struggle to triumph over communism. As the monarchy and the military worked closely together, it is necessary to address the role of monarchy in the making of thahan nak phatthana, the development military.

While thousands of development projects advanced the image of kasat nak phatthana, (the development monarch) for King Bhumibol, the military adopted the term thahan nak phatthana, the development military, in a bid to secure the same public appeal. The higher the moral authority of King Bhumibol, the more the military relied on royal legitimacy to expand its role in the socio-economic sphere. This institutional relationship allowed the whole armed forces, not just individual military leaders, to expand their role into the socio-political area.

The military's policy of development for security has been dynamic from the counterinsurgency period to the present.

I grew up in an area adjacent to Bangkok's Ratchadamnoen Avenue, the centre stage of many significant events in modern Thai politics. I had the opportunity to witness several popular demonstrations, beginning with the 14 October 1973 uprising, and too many military coups d’état. Even before the generals made a public announcement, I knew we had another coup when the phone line at home was cut off and the area was swarming with soldiers and military trucks. Despite being familiar with this vicious cycle of civilian government and military rule, I refuse to accept that military rule is the norm for Thailand. It is frustrating to see the growing popularity of the military among a large section of people, the consolidation of military power, the increasing militarization of society in various aspects, the lack of accountability for those involved in violent crackdowns, and the impunity that the military and the rightist elite enjoy. Still, like the majority of Thai people, I have long overlooked the political apparatus of the military. Like most others, I paid attention to the military mainly when the country was under its rule.

The sweeping and heavy-handed attempts of the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), the junta of the 22 May 2014 coup, to impose its version of security and order in civil space triggered my curiosity. The first unusual activities of the NCPO I noticed took place soon after the coup. For example, there were forced evictions of small farmers from the forest reserve areas, an obsession with management of traffic and street food in Bangkok, remobilization of many mass organizations, the resurfacing of the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) in news headlines, and the establishment of ISOC-led popular surveillance mechanisms in Bangkok and the provinces. The longer the NCPO stayed in power, the more expansive and intensive the military's political control over civilian lives became, justified on grounds of the nation's internal security. I could not find a satisfactory answer to why all this happened. The matter was too important to ignore. I decided to dig for more information. This became my first research project on the Thai military, a topic I had never thought I would address, mainly because I do not enjoy the politics of cliques and classes, a dominant feature of Thai military studies, and partly because the military's machoism dulls my interest.

This study has shown the extent to which the Thai military has dominated the country's internal security affairs since the Cold War period. ISOC is not the only agency in charge of internal security, but the whole armed forces, and the army in particular, are devoted to the mission. ISOC has coordinating and commanding authority over the police and other civilian agencies. ISOC can utilize the robust infrastructure of the army units as well as various civilian bureaucratic agencies. The modern Thai armed forces have never engaged in large-scale warfare with an external enemy since their formation in the early twentieth century. Internal security is the raison d’être of the Thai armed forces and the source of its expanding scope since the counterinsurgency period, defining its role and lending it authority over national institutions and the people.

The political offensive approach against the communist threat opened up a path for the military to engage in the nation's socio-economic and political development. Under successive military governments, the army took over political affairs. On the one hand, the operations allowed the army to lead and coordinate other state agencies in the counterinsurgency. On the other hand, the integration of development projects, mass organizations, ideological indoctrination and propaganda programmes into its operations consolidated the army's role and authority in the nation's socio-economic and political affairs.

The line that distinguishes internal security from normal domestic affairs became increasingly blurred in the post-counterinsurgency period. The definition of internal security became much broader on grounds of meeting new threats in a volatile world. Many new security threats were non-combatant in nature, yet the Thai military folded them into its mission. From fighting communist insurgency, its mission extended to defending and promoting the monarchy, eradicating poverty, managing democratization, protecting natural resources, combatting human and drugs trafficking, and building political unity. A new term was created to disguise the military's political strategy: counterinsurgency operations was supplanted by civil affairs.

The internal security mechanism became a political tool of the military and its conservative allies to protect and perpetuate their political domination and suppress political dissidents.

Since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has spent more time under a military regimes than under civilian rule. The military and its conservative allies have tended to define what are the threats to national security. Despite a change in socio-political circumstances in the postcounterinsurgency period, new threats have been defined which provide the rationale and legitimacy for the military, especially the army, to expand its socio-political role. In contrast, civilian governments have paid little attention to this matter. This chapter examines the development of the power of the military—the army in particular—over internal security affairs.

The chapter contains two sections. The first provides the basic understanding of the Thai state's counterinsurgency operations against the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) since the 1950s. It begins with a brief description of the origin of the struggle against the CPT and how this struggle defined the Thai state's perception, strategy and operations on internal security affairs. The cooperation among the military, the monarchy and the United States is discussed. Then, I trace the emergence of the two key concepts of Thailand's counterinsurgency operations: the concept of political offensive (kanmueang nam kanthahan) and the concept of development for security (yutthaphatthana). These two concepts were the basis for the expansion of the military role in the socio-economic and political development spheres during the counterinsurgency period, and were sustained with modifications in the post-counterinsurgency period. I demonstrate that ISOC was not the only agency involved in internal security operations as commonly understood. All branches of the Thai armed forces, including the army, navy, air force and the Supreme Command, have been extensively involved in the country's socio-political affairs at least since the early 1980s when the communist threat was in decline. Internal security has been the leading mission of the Thai armed forces.

In the post-counterinsurgency period the threats to national security no longer involved combat and hence should have been the responsibility of civilian agencies, yet the military continued to claim that managing these threats was its main mission. The second section shows how the military secured legal and political legitimacy to continue its wider sociopolitical role from the counterinsurgency period until the present day.

Anwar bin Ibrahim, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, 1993–98, and Opposition Leader, 2008–15 and since March 2020, was born on 10 August 1947 in the village of Cherok To’kun, on the mainland part of the state of Penang. Anwar completed his schooling at Malay College Kuala Kangsar. From 1967 to 1971, he studied at the University of Malaya; there he was a leader of the National Union of Muslim Students of Malaysia, and the Malay Language Society of University of Malaya. With several fellow activists he founded Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM, or Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement) in August 1971. The best-known figure of ABIM, Anwar became its president in 1974. He held that position for almost eight years, including the 22 months between January 1975 and November 1976 when he was detained without trial as a “threat to national security” following the 1974 student demonstrations in Baling, Kedah. In 1981 he chaired a broad civil society coalition to oppose the Societies Amendment Bill which, among others, was meant to curb ABIM's growing influence.

Anwar left ABIM and joined the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) in March 1982. He swiftly and steadily rose in UMNO and held different portfolios in Mahathir Mohamad's various Cabinets. He could claim to be Mahathir's “anointed successor” after UMNO elected him its Deputy President in 1993 and 1996. Anwar was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance when the East Asian financial crisis struck in 1997. But on 2 September 1998, Anwar was dismissed from all official posts, expelled from UMNO the next day, arrested on 20 September, convicted on charges of corruption and sodomy later, and handed a combined jail sentence of 15 years.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • Anwar Ibrahim, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, 1993–98, and Opposition Leader, 2008–15 and since March 2020, is associated with two lasting, seemingly contradictory images. Those were of the young Anwar as a radical Islamist for whom economics seemed not to matter, and as a pro-market reformer during the 1997 East Asian financial crisis for whom Islam no longer mattered.

• • Yet there was economics in the young Anwar's Islam and, conversely, Islam in the mature man's economics. Between them lay certain “moral ambivalences” that occupied Anwar during the pre-crisis period when economic growth, prosperity and ambitions were dogged by rent-seeking, corruption and institutional degradation.

• • Anwar had expressed various thoughts on “Islam and economics”, notably when he was President of Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM, or Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement), Minister of Finance (1991–98), and leader of the post-Reformasi opposition. His thoughts formed the core of a “humane economy” that he envisioned and advocated upon his return to active politics from 2006 onwards.

• • The vision of a “humane economy” holds personal, ideological and political significance at a specific political juncture in Malaysian history.